


I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

by Neverever



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Character Study, Decisions, Falling In Love, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 10:56:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14163327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neverever/pseuds/Neverever
Summary: Steve considers his feelings for Tony at a critical moment.





	I'll Sleep When I'm Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Captain America-Iron Man MCU Tribute. This is for Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
> 
> Big thanks to my beta, arms_plutonic.

Steve stood on the wall, arms crossed, looking out into the horizon, a phone heavy in a pocket of his jacket.

Fury, Hill, Sam and Natasha were inside Fury’s hideout plotting out their course of attack on the helicarriers, targeting SHIELD, what needed to be done, all the details. Steve had already laid out what he thought they needed to do. Fury needed a few minutes to sort it all out.

And they thought they were giving Steve space to figure out Bucky. But Bucky was not the man on his mind. 

The phone wasn’t his. He’d borrowed it from Fury’s supply stash. His mind — blessed and cursed with perfect memory — already had the number he needed. 

If he called Tony, what would he say? Why would he even call Tony?

Steve shouldn’t feel this paralyzed. But it was a choice, a definitive step in one direction or in another. Depending on what he wanted.

What makes you happy?

They had a few hours before they had to get to the Triskelion. He could feel the press of running out of time and the finality of coming to the end of a road he’d been on since he came back to his apartment to find Fury wounded and bleeding in his living room.

Steve was a man defined by his lack of choices. People told him that he had options, choices, alternative pathsand all that. But Steve didn’t see it that way. In each and every case of what other people thought were choices, Steve saw one single path.

Fury had given him options after the Battle of New York. He called them options; Steve didn’t. Steve stared out at the strange New York skyline as his small plate of fancy food cooled and Fury, on the opposite side of the table, rattled off a job offer. 

Go out and see the world, Fury had once urged him. Come back and work for me, he now said. Any job you want, any place you want. Name it.

Back in his apartment, the one that SHIELD decorated so that fragile Steve wouldn’t freak out about the future, he had a pile of paper nearly as tall as him with all that the government offered him. Back-pay forms, letters about his Army commission and promotions, complicated and dense government paperwork laying out his benefits, simple forms about correcting his death certificate, and forms to get duplicates of awards and medals, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. A pile of options and choices and yes/no and ticky boxes.

All of it junk.

What people were really saying was pick this and we’ll stick you in this box; pick that, you’re in that box. Like Steve had a choice of which box to be in.

He wanted to be useful, and the only way he could be useful was to fight. He was born fighting and he’d die fighting. 

And that’s how he ended up in Washington, DC in an apartment he barely lived in, working in a Brutalist-style office building he despised, and carrying out missions he suspected were morally dubious.

Then there was Tony Stark. A bright streak of light against the darkness of Steve’s world.

What he saw of the man in action had changed his mind from what the people at SHIELD told him before the Battle of New York. Steve made his peace with Tony before parting ways and that their paths might cross again. But on downtimes between missions, questions about Tony crossed his mind.

There were articles and documentaries and unauthorized biographies about Tony and that movie that was coming out next year. He learned nothing he didn’t already know. 

Peggy couldn’t give him any more insight than what he read online and saw in video. “I haven’t seen Tony in years -- I met him when he was a kid completely by accident and Howard never introduced us. Howard had a strict boundary between SHIELD and his family.”

Then Steve ran into Tony unexpectedly at a charity golf event for survivors of the Battle of New York. Tony was all fragile smiles and bravado. “Nice to see you, Stars and Stripes,” he said. He was wearing a jacket, with sneakers and sunglasses.

Tony had told him that he would have cut the wire instead of crawling over or under. Steve had been awake long enough to be sick of hearing about ‘thinking outside the box.’ But Tony -- he was the perfect example of that.

Where Steve had his pick-this-or-that life, Tony’s life was expansive, full of options, and no walls or limits. 

“You don’t have to work for Fury, you know,” Tony said at a quiet moment during the dinner after the golf game. “Come work for me.”

Steve almost asked if Howard’s ghost suggested that. “It’s good work,” he replied instead. 

Tony cocked his head to the side. The air between them suddenly felt charged, like at any minute anything could happen. Steve’s breath hitched. Tony leaned in and put a hand on Steve’s arm. “I have a better vacation plan.”

“How do you know?”

“Stark Industries offers a very competitive benefits package. Best in the country.”

But then Pepper came and collected Tony. “He needs to say a few words to the crowd.” She rubbed Tony’s back and smiled at Steve.

It felt like she had interrupted something big. Not just a comparison of Stark Industries with SHIELD. Steve at the time couldn’t put a finger on it. Only that he wanted more of those moments with Tony, with Tony focused on him and him alone. 

After that, Tony texted him regularly. A private joke between them. “No one will believe that Captain America can text,” Tony said with a wink.

Tony’s sharp, funny texts from all over the world were a bright spot in Steve’s world. Steve read through Tony’s comments about California weather as he sat waiting for Peggy to return to her room. It was spitting snow outside on a raw, cold DC winter day, and there was Tony talking about the sun and surf he could see from his window.

Steve chatted about work with Peggy, who smiled knowingly at him about SHIELD operations. When she remembered. He tried to find the words to describe what wasn’t right about the missions, about Fury’s secrets, about not knowing what the people on his teams were also working on.

Peggy said, “Are those your only choices?”

He had no answers now or when she had asked him a similar question years and years ago for her, only a short while ago for Steve. Lab rat or performing monkey? How was that different from working for Fury now? 

Natasha sent him a text before Peggy pressed for answers. “You have to go so soon?” she asked.

He tucked the phone back into his jacket. “Another mission.”

“You need a break, Steve.”

“I can sleep when I’m dead,” he replied with a smile. “I’ve already had a long vacation.”

He was halfway across the globe when he first got the news about the Mandarin destroying Tony’s beautiful house. He had a job to do and no time to wonder if he had lost yet another friend. Or ponder why SHIELD failed to respond to anything.

“It’s not our business.” Steve heard that from other agents, but, again, he had no idea what was really going on with SHIELD.

But it was Tony. And Steve hadn’t felt that happy in years when Tony turned up alive.

He watched interviews with Tony on a laptop in his barely furnished living room. Pictures he intended to hang leaned against bare walls and books he planned to read filled bookcases. Steve lived in a perpetual state of ‘not moved in.’ Someone in HR had suggested the apartment. Steve leased it without a look.

All he heard from Tony was that Tony was fine and breathing. That he needed to make things right with his life and his friends. Steve thought of Tony in the Stark Tower in New York and his courage and intelligence. And that’s when Steve had the thought that maybe his feelings about Tony were more than friendship. 

But the texts from Tony came rarely now. Tony was busy and Steve even busier. He had a specific skill set that Fury needed in the field. Rumlow was constantly at his side, talking a lot about this and that. Steve didn’t entirely pay attention, focused on work. Better to ignore loss.

Then there was that one day when he got up a bit late for his morning run and met Sam. Sam didn’t seem all that impressed with the Captain America gig. That’s what made Steve decide to drop by his group therapy session. Sam was a friendly face in a sea of strangers and acquaintances who only wanted things from Steve.

Afterwards Sam and Steve talked for hours, finding an instant friendship. And Sam was the only other person who said to Steve, “You can do anything you want.”

Did anything mean calling Tony? Reaching out to his friend to say I’m thinking of you?

“What makes you happy, Steve?” Sam had asked him earlier that day. 

Steve had no answers for that. What choices did he really have? Where could someone like him go? New York felt like an alien place to him, and Washington was worse. He’d fought too hard to earn his place in a world that was no longer there for him.

Then his whole world went to hell. Fury shot in his apartment, the Winter Soldier turned out to be his long-lost friend Bucky, and SHIELD was HYDRA after all of it. A couple of days on the run, almost killed by people he’d fought beside, and Steve now sat in a secret location wrangling with a very much alive Fury and Hill about razing SHIELD down to the ground.

The path was clear. Destroy the helicarriers, save the world from HYDRA, maybe rescue Bucky. 

But Steve couldn’t explain why he was now leaning on a railing, holding his phone like it was a snake ready to bite him.

This wasn’t him going down in a crashing plane, with Peggy on the other side of the radio. There had been no time to think about what to say -- only the press of time running out, desperation in her voice to save him, and him knowing that it wasn’t going to end well for either of them.

But now. He had a sliver of time before Sam came for him.

Steve was a man defined by his lack of choices. But he was going to die tomorrow saving the world, and if he didn’t say something, he would leave the world with one regret.

It was a choice, a decision, something for him alone. 

He took the phone out of his pocket, feeling the weight of it, heavier than the earth. His fingers swiped over the numbers. He took a breath. This was his decision, his step forward on a journey with no known destination.

He called Tony one last time, not expecting to reach him. “Tony, I am going on one last mission, something I’m not coming back from. I should have taken you up on that job offer.” His thumb paused over the screen, frozen in fear about what he needed to say next. He’d failed to say it to Peggy all those years ago, and now he got a do-over. “I love you.” 

There was no reason he should have lived through it all, falling into the Potomac from that great a height in a storm of swirling debris. He woke up, surprised to be alive. A day later, he was fast healing. Sam’s chair was empty -- he’d gone off for coffee leaving his phone behind playing music. 

Tony leaned against the door. “You’re a hard man to kill,” he said fondly.

Steve’s heart did a flip-flop. He smiled brightly. “You are too.”

“Is that seat free?” 

Steve nodded. “Are you here to offer me a job?”

Tony, worn and tired, sat heavily down in the chair. He’d tell Steve later that he hadn’t slept for over 48 hours, glued to the television and internet waiting for news about Steve. And because of Steve’s voicemail. But that was later, much later. 

He reached for Steve’s hand. “No, just company.”

Steve looked down at Tony’s hand intertwined in his. He had a peace in his soul and a feeling that might be happiness. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”


End file.
